Romain Libeau is the Co-Founder & CEO of Pivot. He first worked as Marketing Director at Deliveroo before joining the French employee benefits unicorn Swile as the first employee, where he was successively CMO, then COO and finally CPO. In 2023, he co-founded Pivot with Marc-Antoine Lacroix (former CTO then CPO of the French neonbank unicorn Qonto) and Estelle Giuly(expert engineer in workflow automation, formerly at Wave.ai and Nuxeo). Combined, the 3 of them make up a founding team with a strong track record in building category-leading financial products.
Having raised in excess of €25m in the second half of 2023 across two funding rounds, we were delighted to catch up with Romain and capture a picture of Pivot.
Romain, what is Pivot?
Pivot is a modern Intake-to-Pay tool that helps companies keep their spend under control while enhancing their teams.
With this all-in-one procurement platform, companies can:
- Offer a top-notch intake experience to their employees with tailor-made workflows for quick approvals, mobile-friendly experience and AI-assisted intake
- Validate invoices in seconds and keep all costs under control with best-in-class OCR, PO <> Invoice matching and a platform natively connected to the ERP
- Efficiently and securely onboard new vendors with a unified source of truth, dedicated workflows for new vendors and a Vendor Portal
- Have real-time control with real-time budgets and AI-powered analytics
Pivot is natively integrated with companies’ tool stack (ERP, HRIS, productivity, legal), can be deployed within a few days (without the help of an integrator) and helps all teams work more efficiently together (procurement, legal, IT & Security, FP&A and accounting).
What issue does your solution solve?
Incumbent procurement tools are not fit for modern companies:
- They are drowning in unnecessary features: legacy procurement tools, burdened by two decades of feature accumulation, are now unwieldy and counterproductive for today’s companies
- Employees are frustrated: designed without employee-centric considerations, these tools lead to decreased adoption among employees and hindering process efficiency
- Implementation is highly complex: legacy tools bring with them long lead times and high integration costs, which doesn’t fit modern fast-paced businesses
This situation results in a gauntlet of complexities for those companies: fragmented data collection, lack of spend visibility resulting in missed savings, complex collaboration across teams and complex collaboration across teams.
What does your perfect client look like?
Pivot targets European companies with 200 to 5,000 employees that struggle with their current procurement processes and who want an immediate value (no implementation delay). The CFO/Head of Finance or the Head of Procurement/Procurement Manager is usually the right contact within the company.
What is the biggest challenge Pivot faces?
Pivot’s primary challenge, also its greatest opportunity, is in transforming the procurement landscape.
The current market is polarised between traditional companies offering all-in-one solutions that lack effectiveness, have a closed ecosystem, are highly complex to implement, and best-of-breed solutions that excel in specific areas like sourcing or contract life cycle management but struggle with data interconnectivity. Combination of best of breed products also leads to cost inefficiency.
Pivot’s task is to forge a new paradigm that combines the strengths of both models. This involves developing an end-to-end platform with all features found in a comprehensive intake-to-pay system, coupled with exceptional user experience and seamless integration with the existing toolstack – interoperability is crucial. Pivot stands out with its innovative, intuitive, and efficient solution, uniquely poised to change industry perceptions and address these pain points.
Why pick Pivot?
Pivot is built by a team of experts: 2 founders who are former C-levels of French unicorns (Qonto and Swile) and a team of employees from tier-1 companies (Amplitude, Zendesk, Alan, Contentsquare, Doctolib, Payfit, McKinsey, etc.). Tier-1 investors backed this team and Top European scale-ups already trust Pivot.
Unlike existing solutions, Pivot drastically simplifies purchasing processes thanks to intuitive interfaces and artificial intelligence, making it easy for all employees to adopt the tool: they can make it their own, even if they have no advanced financial knowledge, and they can focus on high value-added tasks.
Pivot is designed to streamline the process, while meeting the transparency and security requirements of finance and IT teams. It is interoperable with various applications in the professional environment: communication tools like Slack, ERP like Netsuite, solutions for SSO and provisioning like Okta, or even Personio and BambooHR for HR data.
Thanks to native integrations with the customer’s ERP and business tools, Pivot can be deployed within an organization in record time, without the need for a costly integrator.